Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Subaru withdraws from WRC

As I wrote yesterday, the economic disaster we are going through is taking a toll on auto racing. In a stunning announcement, Subaru has decided to end it's factory racing program in the World Rally Championship. Since Suzuki has already announced they too will leave the WRC, this leaves only Citroen and Ford as the only factory backed teams in the series.

This is really sad since the Subaru name is virtually synonymous with rally racing. Subaru entered the rally scene in 1989 by joining forces with Prodrive and together they have won six championship titles and featured some great drivers like Carlos Sainz, Colin McRae, Richard Burns and Petter Solberg.

Not good news for the WRC since they are in the midst of implementing rules changes to lure some other manufacturers to the series and gain back some recently lost popularity. To me it won't be the same without seeing Mitsubishi and Subaru battling it out on the rally circuit.